Veeam fuels a dynamic DR and BC strategy for Hertz Israel

The business challenges

Connectivity is king in the car rental market. Gone are the days of waiting in line for hours to rent a car. Online platforms let customers book rentals and pay for them quickly and easily.

Online platforms aren’t the only driving force in the car rental market. A penetration of smartphones and an increase in air travel also accelerate global growth. The market is expected to reach an estimated $120 billion by 2025 according to the Car Rental Industry Report.

Hertz Israel reaps the benefits as the market grows. Each year the franchise rents upward of 500,000 vehicles at 19 locations staffed by professional and experienced teams. To fulfill customers’ needs and requirements, these teams must have access to the IT systems supporting car rental, including a customer relationship management (CRM) database, web servers and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle underpin most systems.

“Our challenge was ensuring availability of critical systems,” said Asaf Frid, IT System Manager at Hertz Israel. “Our legacy solution was slow to back up our virtual machines (VMs), and recovery was unreliable. We didn’t have granular recovery, so recovery was slow too, and it was impacting the business.”

The legacy offering didn’t provide a suitable disaster recovery (DR) solution for business continuity (BC), so the IT team used VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for replication. Frid said SRM worked well, but the team knew there was one solution that could do it all — backup, recovery, replication and DR — faster and easier.

“We need to keep our critical systems available so the business can move forward,” Frid said. “Without that level of data protection, we risk customer satisfaction and revenue.”

The Veeam solution

Hertz Israel replaced both solutions with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam fuels a dynamic DR and BC strategy, backing up 83% faster and recovering 92% faster. Veeam also saves 500 hours in backup management time and 25% in IT costs each year.

“People ask me to explain the difference between legacy backup and Veeam,” Frid said. “It’s like riding a bike when you could be driving a Rolls Royce. The benefits are enormous.”

Frid said Veeam provides functionality that wasn’t available in the legacy solution, beginning with faster backup. Faster backup enables more frequent backup, giving the IT team additional recovery points. Frid said recovery is faster too, and since Veeam offers granular recovery, the team will spend less time recovering individual items in SQL and Oracle. Veeam Explorers for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle restore and export databases from backups.

“In a disaster situation, we know we can fail over to a replica at our DR site, fail back to our production site and restart the business quickly,” Frid said. “I don’t know what we’d do without Veeam.”

Veeam backs up 30 TB across 100 VMware vSphere virtual machines on-premises for fast, local recovery and off-premises for DR and BC.

“Life changes when you deploy Veeam,” Frid said. “It’s simple to implement and easy to manage, saving 500 hours in backup management time each year. Time is money.”

Veeam saves on IT costs too. Legacy backup required agents to protect VMs, but Veeam did not, saving 25% each year.

“It’s fantastic software,” Frid said. “There’s nothing on the market like Veeam.”

The results

• Protects all critical IT systems supporting vehicle rental
  “Veeam is much more than a backup solution — it’s a market leader in DR and BC solutions,” Frid said.
• Increases backup speed by 83% and recovery speed by 92%
  “Backing up 1 TB with our legacy solution took over two hours which was insane,” Frid said. “Backing up 1 TB with Veeam takes one hour. Recovery is quicker too. Recovering several VMs with the legacy solution took one hour but recovering those same VMs with Veeam takes minutes.”
• Saves 500 hours in backup management time and 25% in IT costs annually
  “Each morning Veeam sends us an email with backup logs,” Frid said. “We see that VMs have been backed up, so we get on with our day. With legacy backup, we had to spend a few hours rerunning failed backups — when we could have been working on other projects. We save time another way. Veeam didn’t require agents like legacy backup, so we don’t have to spend time updating them. Agents are time-consuming, and they’re expensive.”